On Thanksgiving Day, Americans show their appreciation for life’s blessings by enjoying home-cooked feasts with family and close friends. Their meal is often bookended by time spent enjoying the outdoors or watching televised parades and football games.
Thanksgiving also starts the holiday season. For many Americans, the days around Thanksgiving are marked by traditions that range from gift shopping to volunteering in their local communities. Here’s a look at the full week that encompasses Thanksgiving, with its days that bring family time, an economic jolt and generosity toward others.
Road-trip Wednesday
Above all, Thanksgiving means visiting family and friends. It is the busiest travel time of the year, with 82 million people expected to travel for the 2025 holiday. The American Automobile Association projects peak road travel on Wednesday afternoon, the day before Thursday’s feast.
Thanksgiving Thursday
The exact date shifts, but not the day of the week — Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday of November each year.
Thanksgiving dinner honors an American origin story about a time in 1621 when the Pilgrims shared a feast with members of the Wampanoag tribe. Preparing a meal to share with friends and family remains central to Thanksgiving. And the get-togethers can last all day, with the meal falling between watching a televised parade (or attending a smaller, local one) in the morning and enjoying televised football games in the afternoon.
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the most famous one, began a century ago in New York. Millions nationwide watch in wonder, in person or via television, as giant balloon-characters and floats pass by Central Park and along Sixth Avenue.
And Thanksgiving Day pro football games rank among the most-watched sporting events of the year. Except during World War II, the Detroit Lions have played on Thanksgiving every year since 1934. The National Football League now plays three games on Thanksgiving. This year, the Lions will take on their rival, the Green Bay Packers. The Dallas Cowboys will face the Kansas City Chiefs. And the Baltimore Ravens will play against the Cincinnati Bengals.
Black Friday
The name comes from a notion among some retailers that consumer spending on the day after Thanksgiving drives their balance sheets out of the red and into the black, or profitable, sphere.
In reality, that accounting milestone is different for each store. But shopping on Black Friday is important to retailers’ performance for the year says the chief economist of the National Retail Federation (NRF), Mark Mathews.
Stores plan promotions to encourage Black Friday shoppers. This year, indicators look strong. NRF predicts a record 187 million people will shop between Thanksgiving Day and the following Monday. Sales in November and December combined are expected to grow close to 4% over the same period in 2024 and to exceed $1 trillion for the first time this year.
Consumer spending is 69% of the U.S. economy (or nominal gross domestic product), and the U.S. economy represents a large share of the world’s economy, according to the International Monetary Fund .
Small Business Saturday
Entrepreneurship is a key part of America’s success, and it is alive and well on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, when consumers shop at small, local stores. (Small businesses make up 98% of all retail businesses in the United States.)
The majority of shoppers headed to stores on this Saturday are intent upon helping independent stores in their communities, says NRF’s Mathews. Smaller stores account for 40% of all retail jobs in the United States, according to the NRF.
Of course, some of those local, independent stores won’t stay small. Most of the biggest U.S. retail companies started as mom-and-pop stores years ago.
Air travel Sunday
Millions of Americans who make a long weekend out of the holiday head to an airport on Sunday to return to their workweek routines. An estimated 3.2 million travelers are expected to pack U.S. airports on November 30. The industry trade group Airlines for America projects airlines in the U.S. will carry 31 million passengers during the 2025 Thanksgiving week, an all-time high.
Cyber Monday
On this day, online sales can skyrocket to four or five times a normal day’s sales. Since 2005, retailers have turned Cyber Monday into an online counterpart to Black Friday, with web-only discount deals on gift items, including electronics, toys and clothing.
In 2024, total Cyber Monday spending hit $13.3 billion, according to the business website Exploding Topics.
Giving Tuesday
After shopping for friends and family, Americans continue their holiday generosity by volunteering or donating to charity on the first Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Thirty-six million Americans participated in Giving Tuesday in 2024, donating $3.6 billion to charitable causes.
Since Giving Tuesday’s 2012 founding, its U.S. donation drives have raised $18.5 billion .
The spirit of giving extends beyond the holidays. In 2024, U.S. charitable donations topped $592 billion, according to the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University.
